Pilgrimage To Nowhere

“Pilgrimage to Nowhere” is an excerpt from Andrew Boyd’s as-yet-unpublished book of the same name about his spiritual (and not-so-spiritual) misadventures traveling around the world.

— Ed.

IF SPIRITUAL SEEKERS coming to Thailand were treated like their sex-tourist brethren, a contingent of saffron-robed monks would accost you at the Bangkok airport, getting up in your face with a laminated menu of spiritual offerings and shouting, “Intensive Vipassana meditation! Twenty-one-day monastery stay! All-you-can-eat vegetarian meals! Hurt your knees! No sex! Donations only!”

This was not the scene that confronted me on my arrival, but I did pick up a booklet from the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Bangkok, listing more than one hundred different temple stays, classes, and meditation retreats. At the boutique end of the spectrum was Wat Khao Tham, a Buddhist island retreat run by an expatriate Aussie American couple, complete with nearby spa, yoga workouts, and continental breakfasts. At the more austere end was the forest monastery of Wat Suan Mokkh, home temple of the late Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, a monk revered for his antimaterialism and rejection of worldly pleasures.

Bewildered by all the options, I got in touch with Joe Cummings, a friend of a friend and author of Lonely Planet’s Thailand and Laos guidebooks. He recommended Doi Suthep monastery, which had a program for international students and a lineage tied to meditation master Ajaan Tong Sirimangalo.

“Of course, it’s been a few years since I’ve been there,” Joe added. “Things change.” I’ve noticed that he and his Lonely Planet cohorts slip this disclaimer into every guidebook.

I contacted the monastery via e-mail. A message came back from one Phra Sam. Phra is Thai for “monk”; Sam is Canadian for “Sam.” He sent me an application form, which asked about my goals. Goals? Annihilate my ego, such as it is, I wanted to say (with the proviso that I could do this during an abbreviated ten-day stay and still make my next flight). Instead I wrote, “To make compassion the source of my actions.” I’m not sure what I meant by this, but it got me in.

IT WAS LATE in the afternoon when I arrived at Doi Suthep. Saffron prayer flags fluttered in the breeze, slapping against the parking-lot lampposts. A few Thai families and several pairs of young European tourists were making their way up the final 108 steps to the hilltop temple and its four-hundred-year-old monastery. Some older and more-out-of-shape tourists were waiting for the elevator that had been installed the previous year. Pushcarts selling Buddhist paraphernalia were doing a brisk business. At the foot of the steps, a woman and her twin daughters were begging.

For the drive up from Chiang Mai, the nearest city, I’d split a taxi with two young German women, one of whom was blond, cute, and sufficiently charmed with me to have more or less invited me back to the guesthouse where she’d be staying that night — the same night that I, in a cruel twist of fate, would be putting on the white robes of an apprentice monk and swearing an oath of celibacy.

The two German tourists and I ascended the stairs together. They carried only water bottles and tiny shoulder bags; I had a full pack on. I could have taken the elevator, but it had occurred to me to make of these steps an impromptu minipilgrimage. I would squeeze the pilgrim’s narrative into these 108 stairs — 108 being, according to Buddhist metaphysics, the number of difficulties to be overcome in the quest for enlightenment.

Over the previous four weeks I’d tramped around Asia, visiting five countries. Now I was going to sit in one place for ten days and travel inward. Why? It was an experiment. I’d come to Doi Suthep to see if I had the stuff that monks are made of.

When asked my religion on a form, I’d check the box “Other.” If there was a blank line, I might write in, “atheist with a vivid imagination,” “lapsed secular humanist,” or simply, “disorganized.” But like any half-literate member of the counterculture, I was theoretically part Buddhist. In my salad days I’d hitchhiked around the western United States, reading the Beats, The Tao of Physics, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’d parsed my acid experiences in the language of Jungian archetypes as well as Buddhist notions of maya, karma, and samsara. Decades later I’d still turn out in the rain in Central Park to hear the Dalai Lama speak, and friends and I might exclaim, in the face of a perplexing yet paradoxically perfect moment, “That’s so Zen!” But outside of a weekend stay at a meditation center here and there, I had never committed myself to a spiritual practice, instead pursuing a life of social activism and Abbie Hoffman–style political pranking.

And so I’d come to Doi Suthep to see what would happen if I sat in silence day after day after day. Would I freak out? Would I go out of my head with boredom? Or would I burn away some of my vanity and walk out of this spiritual boot camp slightly more realized, slightly more adult?

As I neared the top of the stairs, my shoulders were hurting, and my calves were sore. As befits a pilgrim, I wore the sweat as a mark of virtue, and the pain felt almost purifying. Cresting the last stair — in effect, reaching the 108th and final stage of enlightenment — I arrived at a ticket window. The German women had to pay, while I, the apprentice-monk-to-be, got in free. My companions passed into the main monastery complex; I walked around the side toward the monks’ quarters. It was a separation of worlds: idle chatter and lovely blond temptress in one direction, silence and sublimated sexual desire in the other.

I was greeted by a bald, white-robed nun. Like a stern housekeeper she sized me up but betrayed no judgment. “Phra Sam was expecting you earlier,” she said with a thick German accent. “He is not here now. Come.” She led me down a concrete staircase, past a half-built dormitory — rebar poking up into the sky — and into a courtyard with scattered concrete benches and monks’ robes hanging on a clothesline, saffron yellow against the blue sky. A scruffy black dog crossed our path, and I stopped to scratch it behind the ears. Am I doing this mindfully enough? I wondered. Can anyone tell?

She led me to a poorly lit meditation room and gave me a thin mat and several wool blankets with which to make a bed in the corner. The last meal of the day had already been eaten at 11 a.m. The next meal would be at 6:30 the following morning. All apprentices were expected to rise at 4 a.m. After breakfast, Phra Sam would conduct a vow-taking ceremony and give me my white apprentice robes. Until then I was to wear my whitest and loosest-fitting clothing.

After I’d settled in, I went upstairs to a large meditation hall. The walls were white plaster, the window frames red and peeling, the wood floor stained an uneven blond. At one end was a Buddha shrine; at the other, a bank of fluorescent lights. I pulled a cushion under my butt, crossed my legs, cupped one hand inside the other just below my navel, and tried to quiet my mind. My thoughts, however, were anything but quiet. I’d been jamming sights and sounds and smells into every sensory orifice for four weeks, and I had “monkey mind”: little gibbering creatures clambering all over the furniture inside my head. I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d made a huge mistake. What was this place that I’d come to, with its flickering fluorescent lights, clumsily carved Buddha statue, and damp-wool smell? And why was I taking ten days out of my grand Asian adventure to be frustrated by the everyday workings of my own thick head? Was I just another Western spiritual tourist, an experience junkie who had to try it all, a lost soul in search of some ill-defined notion of self — or no-self?

That night I had a dream: I was walking with the cute German tourist, who was pushing a stroller, “practicing” for when she had a kid. She was trying to get pregnant, she said, and I listened politely as she described her fucking schedule and fertility cycle. Instead of a baby in the carriage, there was a little Buddha. 

WHEN YOU JOIN a Buddhist monastery — even as a Western apprentice monk who’s just passing through — you take vows not to engage in sexual activity of any kind, not to steal, not to indulge in self-adornment or useless speech, and not to kill. There’s an elaborate induction ceremony, which Phra Sam took me through that first morning. I had to repeat back a number of long, incomprehensible Thai and Pali sentences and prostrate myself to idols and personages I wasn’t sure I believed in. My knees and ankles locked up as I bowed down to the plaster Buddha statuette. Then I scanned the fine print of the English translation of my vows, to see what I was getting myself into. I noticed that “no sexual activity” meant I couldn’t talk to any of the nuns; “no stealing” meant I couldn’t borrow anyone else’s shampoo without asking; and “no killing” meant I couldn’t even murder mosquitoes.

After the vow taking, I removed my two rings and the stud from my left ear. Phra Sam handed me a neatly folded pair of white drawstring pants and two front-buttoning white shirts: the “robes” that would mark me as an apprentice monk.

“Are you clear on the practice?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Well, no. Not completely.”

He demonstrated how to do the walking meditation: slow, even footfalls, each step broken into three distinct parts. I followed his example, feeling silly. It seemed like a pantomime of walking.

“Vipassana is insight meditation, the original teaching of the elders,” said Sam, as he sat down in a meditation posture, indicating I should do the same. “All suffering is the result of ignorance and attachment. We overcome this through the practice of mindfulness. When you meditate, thoughts and feelings will arise. Try to neither indulge them nor suppress them.”

“The middle way.”

“Yes, in Vipassana we follow always the middle way.”

I’d heard that Phra Sam had been in a punk band in Canada. Bald, wiry, and pale, he still looked the part, only instead of combat boots and black leather, he wore flip-flops and the saffron robe of an ordained monk; and instead of a snarl, his lips were fixed in a slight smile. A sign of wisdom? Or a tic picked up at monk finishing school? I hoped it was the former.

“Focus on the rising and falling of the abdomen,” he instructed. “Be mindful at all times. Always be noticing . . . noticing. When you’re eating, be chewing . . . chewing. When brushing your teeth, be brushing . . . brushing.”

“Should I actually be saying, Noticing . . . noticing, in my mind?” I asked.

Phra Sam’s smile faded. “Just BE noticing . . . noticing.”

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